It's actually his family's original surname.
http://www.snopes.com/donald-drumpf/
Back on topic:
Undo the Sykes-Picot agreement. Though, it's probably too late for that to do anything now.
Given history like US prohibition, I'm prone to think banning something people are hopelessly addicted to and dependent on will only make the problem worse.
Really we're best off just leaving them to kill each other, as it seems outside assistance is neither wanted nor particularly improving the situation.
Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.
So I chose the path of the Ebon Blade, and not a day passes where i've regretted it.
I am eternal, I am unyielding, I am UNDYING.
I am Zethras, and my blood will be the end of you.
Nothing can be done. I mean Assad is secular and sane but if we support him then we'll just create more sunni jihadists. The best we can do is try to protect the minorities caught in the middle but both sides in the sunni-shia war will blame the west.
The root of the evil is sunni wahhabism that tells young men that all they have to do to get into paradise is commit jihad against non-sunnis' which atones for your past sins. How do you fight that?
Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.
So I chose the path of the Ebon Blade, and not a day passes where i've regretted it.
I am eternal, I am unyielding, I am UNDYING.
I am Zethras, and my blood will be the end of you.
I totally understand the OPs argument, but it's pretty flawed. You need to read ISIS's and Al-Qaeda's philosophy and not just base opinions on news cycles. The stated purpose of both is the elimination of all non-muslims (and all non-Sunni Muslims in the case of ISIS). Their stated goal is *not* the removal of non-Muslim military bases from the Middle East, like apparently the OP and many others mistakenly believe. That's why you constantly see bombings of non-Sunni mosques and non-Sunni shopping areas even in Iraq by ISIS.
Also, most ISIS militants use AK-47s, these aren't weapons introduced into the Middle East by the US.
Lastly, keep in mind 9-11. Before 9-11 in the late 90's Bill Clinton had been given intel on Al-Qaeda, where Osama was in Afghanistan, and that they were planning major terrorist attacks. His decision was whether to leave them be and not "poke the beehive" as it were, thinking if we leave them alone they'll leave us alone (much like the OP suggests)...or he could take the option that the military suggested and strike first. He opted to take the if we leave them alone they'll leave us alone road, and we all know how that turned out.
There has been a long line of mistakes and bad decisions by the West in dealing with the radical Islamic problem. But thinking if we just pull all military from the mideast that there won't be attacks like we've seen, is wishful thinking. The goal of these terrorist groups isn't to have the West leave the Mideast. It's to eliminate all people in the world who are not part of ISIS caliphate, including non-Sunni Muslims in the Mideast - much less people in the West.
by trying to alleviate the economic conditions that cause young men to look at an early death as a reasonable outcome. The young men who are susceptible to terrorist groups' message are those without solid life/work/family prospects (regularly blowing up arab countries has created a large number of these young men, unfortunately.)
there is no short term solution, really. The west (i.e. the U.S.) intervened in and occupied Iraq, and the result was a costly disaster. We intervened in Libya and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. We're currently doing neither (well, mostly) in Syria and while that book on that situation is not done being written, it has all the appearances of being a costly disaster. We do not have a good answer for the problem of an autocratic middle eastern country which is shaking itself apart.
it took hundreds of years of violence, culminating in two continent-devastating industrial wars, for the modern, civil anti-war consensus to emerge in the western world. It literally took a near-apocalypse for the west to agree that 'yo, maybe we need a better way to solve our problems than killing one another.' And we still forget that lesson from time to time.
The middle east does not share that history; in many places the western concept of the nation state is not even endorsed (i.e. the afghani/pakistani border, or modern iraq.) And the places that have had relatively modern governments that might've grown into allies we've generally fucked with so much that they'll take generations to trust the west (i.e. Iran.)
Which is why I said it’s more like cutting the wings off a bird, it’s like what Supertony said, kill the people with brains. Engineers who know how to make bombs, financers, recruiters out in the field, those are all valuable assets that are hard enough to acquire in the first place, but even harder to replace once lost forever. And on top of that, if people hear about “a well-known recruiter or bomb maker of ISIS was killed” then people with that knowledge will think “well shit, if I go and join ISIS, i’ll probably end up dead too, let’s not do that".
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You said *paraphrasing* “Without shadows, there can be no light”, yes? I’m saying that what these people do go beyond the idea of “how would we know good if there was no bad to compare it against.” What they do is truly evil, and our world would improve with their eradication.
Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.
So I chose the path of the Ebon Blade, and not a day passes where i've regretted it.
I am eternal, I am unyielding, I am UNDYING.
I am Zethras, and my blood will be the end of you.
we might know who they are, but 1) knowing where they are at a given time and 2) being able to strike at them are different things
ed: I mean, U.S. forces over the course of time have targeted and killed many AQ/ISIS/terrorist/whatever 'middle managers.' It isn't as though we don't regularly strike at these people with drones and other methods. The people we're fighting aren't stupid.
Last edited by Cheze; 2016-07-23 at 10:10 PM.